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Supreme Court & evolution of gay marriage in America

Gay marriage rulings: POLITICO reports from Supreme Court

Who's who on the Supreme Court

Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy and Chief Justice John Roberts largely cited from their written opinions – overturning the Defense of Marriage Act and punting on jurisdictional grounds over California’s Proposition 8, respectively – as they delivered the most anticipated rulings of the term to an overflow audience packed into the marble hall.

That left it to Justice Antonin Scalia – often the court’s most colorful orator – to deliver with the drama.

Reading his dissenting statement from the bench, the Reagan-era judge blistered Kennedy and his four liberal colleagues for even assuming the Supreme Court had jurisdiction over DOMA, let alone striking down the 1996 law on its merits. The majority, Scalia argued, had shown with its opinion “an exalted notion of the role of this court in American democratic society.”

“Few public controversies touch an institution so central to the lives of so many, and few inspire such attendant passion by good people on all sides,” Scalia said. “Few public controversies will ever demonstrate so vividly the beauty of what our framers gave us, a gift the court pawns today to buy its stolen moment in the spotlight: a system of government that permits us to rule ourselves.”

With Kennedy’s ruling on DOMA, hundreds of employment, tax and other benefits previously denied under federal law will now be open to people legally married in the states that permit same-sex marriage. In the written opinion, Kennedy said that the law “imposes a disability” on people seeking federal recognition of their same-sex marriages approved at the state level.

He added that the law signed by President Bill Clinton crosses the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause because it “singles out a class of persons deemed by a state entitled to recognition and protection to enhance their own liberty.”

But Scalia, over the course of about five minutes, picked apart Kennedy’s opinion stating that DOMA was unconstitutional based on the argument that the law’s supporters were motivated by the “bare desire to…harm” couples in same-sex marriages, to “demean” such couples, to brand gay people as “unworthy” and to “humiliate” their children.

“Bear in mind that the object of this terrible condemnation is not some benighted state legislature and governor, but our respected co-ordinate branches, the Congress and presidency of the United States,” Scalia said. “Laying such a charge against them should require the most extraordinary evidence, and I would have thought that every attempt would be made to indulge a more anodyne explanation for the statute. The majority’s opinion does the opposite, affirmatively concealing from the reader, never mentioning, the arguments that exist in justification.”

“I imagine that this is because it is harder to maintain the illusion of the act’s supporters as unhinged members of a wild-eyed lynch mob when one first describes their views as they see them,” Scalia said.